There are multiple reasons you’d want to set up your internet connection wired. First, it is more secure. Rather than picking up your signal from the ether, one will have to go to greater lengths to get access to your connection. Even the simplest of barriers can ward off a malicious party merely because they are lazy and want the low hanging fruit. Nowhere where you actually want to open up a device will you be so far from an ethernet port that you can’t use a cable. Second, after at least 60 years of research on radiation from technology, there are major signs of damage to the health of humans, animals and plants. Don’t subject yourself nor your loved ones to this. If you want to learn more about these two points, browse this website.

Hardware Requirements

Obviously you’ll need a subscription with your internet service provider and either they provide a modem/router device or you set up your own. Next, the ethernet cable. This is commonly the category 5 cable.

Now, either you have a built-in ethernet port or you don’t. If you work on a laptop, chances are that you don’t. Bigger sized laptops have room for this but bigger makes it harder to deal with as a mobile device, beating the purpose of a laptop. You’ll need a dongle, a converter from USB to ethernet in this case. As this is for Qubes OS, and likely for other linux distributions, you’ll need to look out for a specific one. USB 3.0 will not work. Here’s what you need:

• USB 2.0 on one end
• Fast ethernet 10/100 Mbps on the other end
• ASIX AX88772B chipset

It looks similar to this:

Set up the connection: modem/router – ethernet cable – dongle – laptop

Configuring Qubes

Boot into Qubes and your account. On the top right of the screen there is the icon for the Qubes Device Manager. It looks like this:

Click it to show a list of available devices. USB devices have an icon that looks like this:

Look for the dongle and hover over it with your mouse to prompt the list of VMs it can attach to. Expect it to show the chipset in its name, i.e. ASIX AX88772B.

If the installation of Qubes OS was standard, connect the dongle to the VM named sys-net. Sys-net handles the network connections.

At this point, Qubes’ Network Manager should take over and start to automatically configure and connect to the network, giving access to the internet.

Hardening The Connection

You could leave it like this and start surfing the web. However, it is always wise to beef up security, and to do it immediately. At the top right of the screen, in the taskbar, right click on the Network Connections icon. It looks like this:

Click on ‘Edit Connections…’. The Network Connections window will appear.

Select your connection, likely named ‘Wired connection 1’. Then click on the gear icon at the bottom of the window to bring up the settings.

In the Ethernet tab, next to Device select your device, likely named eth0. Next to Cloned MAC address select Random. Leave the rest as it is. Go to the tab IPv6 Settings.

In the IPv6 Settings tab, next to Method select Ignore.

At the bottom right, click on Save to save the settings.

Close the other screens.

All done. Surf the web or set up a VPN for added security: https://www.modernsamurai.info/qubes-vpn/